The invention disclosed herein relates generally to customer relationship management systems. More particularly, the present invention relates to multi-channel tracking, routing and managing of customer requests by one or more agents physically located at one or more locations to thereby create a virtual contact center.
The dramatic advent of business-to-business and business-to-consumer e-commerce operations has presented near endless opportunities in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) market with an emphasis on customer satisfaction and retention. The availability of multi-channel customer interaction systems that combine telephone, the Internet, electronic mail, fax, and chat are quickly replacing traditional customer interaction methodologies, such as voice-only call centers. Furthermore, cost and efficiency considerations are driving the need for seamless interoperability of the front office CRM with other business functions such as back-office order management, order fulfillment, collection/analysis of customer behavior, and content management.
Conventional call center technology is primarily directed towards enhancing and personalizing customer contact for inbound and toll free public telephone network services. The traditional call center, however, is evolving into a “multimedia contact center” with a new set of drivers and operational challenges. These challenges include:                Multi-channel customer interaction, including voice, data, image, text chat, email and fax;        Personalization: enhanced caller segmentation and treatments based on customer profile, recent calling history, and current customer status, e.g., electronic shopping cart contents;        Productivity: voice response interaction, speech recognition, sophisticated web content management, integrated workflow, agent desktop integration; and        Geographic distribution: virtual contact centers that support global routing, distributed workforce, remote agents and PBX-free call centers.        
Network service providers are well positioned to capitalize on the rapidly evolving drivers for a comprehensive contact center management solution. Service providers can address the technological challenges by leveraging their existing network assets, such as network elements, network services, administration and operations support systems, professional services, and intellectual property. Furthermore, a service provider hosted solution will have the advantage of achieving lower operating costs across multiple customers and will be a carrier-class solution with the ability to offer service level guarantees for performance, security and availability.
There is thus a need for a distributed and automated call center system that overcomes the challenges described above.